Читать книгу The Burying Ground - Janet Kellough - Страница 4

Morgan Spicer had just locked his back door and turned toward the hallway that led to his bedroom when he happened to glance through the tiny kitchen window that looked out over the rows of graves behind the Keeper’s Lodge. Inky shadows chased across the ground as light from the gibbous moon streamed through swaying branches and spilled past marble markers and granite headstones. The distortion made it difficult to decipher the true nature of anything that stood in the burying ground, but Morgan was sure that he had glimpsed something odd — a glint of metal, a reflection of moonlight. Or maybe it was just the tail of a shooting star.

And then, as he squinted into the darkness, one of the shadows suddenly shifted sideways and was caught in silhouette by the moonlight breaking past a cloud.

It was a man in a John Bull hat.

Again Morgan saw a small flash of light. A man in a black hat with a dark lantern, shuttered to shield his presence. Morgan fumbled to unlock the back door. Then he rushed down the path that led past the stone chapel that stood in the centre of the graveyard.

As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he realized that it was not one man, but two, halfway down the length of the grounds, in the middle of the right-hand rows of graves. The man in the hat turned and saw Morgan thundering down the path. With a shout he dropped the lantern. The second man tossed a spade to the ground and they both ran toward the back of the cemetery, where they scrambled over the fence and dropped to the other side. Both men disappeared into the alleyway that wound its way through the surrounding blocks of buildings.

Morgan was tempted to climb the fence and follow them, but he was winded from his run, and the men had far too great a head start for him to ever catch up. He stopped for a moment to get his breath, then he walked back through the Burying Ground to where he’d first seen the intruders.

A mound of soil was heaped beside an open grave, the granite marker knocked to the ground. The lid of the wooden coffin was pried open and the body tossed up against a corner of the hole as if to get it out of the way. One arm was draped along the edge of the hole, the bone shining eerily white as it poked through its winding sheet. The rest of the corpse slumped back into the pit, as if longing to slide back into the earth.

With a sigh, Morgan retrieved the discarded lantern and opened its shutters to cast some light to work by, and then he gently lifted the shrouded body back into its coffin. He used the spade the intruders had left behind to shovel the dirt back into the hole. Only when the earth was mounded over the grave again did he trudge back toward the cottage. The stone could wait until morning.

The local constable was unconcerned when Morgan reported the incident the next day.

“Grave robbers, most likely,” he said. “Resurrectionists. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

“But they didn’t take the body,” Morgan pointed out.

“I expect you surprised them before they had time to grab it.”

“I suppose.” But he was doubtful about this premise. “Then why wouldn’t they be more careful with the marker? It would have been one less thing to put back.”

Grave robbers had targeted the Toronto Strangers’ Burying Ground before. Usually the culprits tried to leave the site as undisturbed as possible in an attempt to disguise their activities. Any items buried with the body were removed and left in the empty coffin. Should the bone diggers be discovered, they would not then be open to charges of theft, as, in that peculiar way of the law, clothing and jewellery were property — a body was not. Once the cadaver was secured, the culprits would replace the earth and rake the surface level in the hope that no one would notice that it had been dug up. No such care had been taken this time. There was no point, Morgan realized. An attempt to restore the appearance of the gravesite only made sense if the burial was recent. This corpse had been in the ground long enough for the dirt to settle and the grass to grow over it. There was no disguising the fact that it had been tampered with.

“Medical students, mark my word,” the constable grumbled. “Students, or those that supply them. Why else would someone want to dig up a grave?”

“But it was such an old body,” Morgan protested. “It was little more than bone. There’s nothing there to dissect. Resurrectionists take bodies that have been dead for only a day or two.”

“Well, if it wasn’t them, then it must have been hooligans,” the constable said, sounding annoyed by Morgan’s persistence. “In any case, there’s no harm done, is there? The body is back where it belongs. I don’t see what you expect me to do.”

In all honesty, neither did Morgan. Even if the constable was right, and the body was the object of plunder, once the culprits had secured it all they had to do was take it to one of the medical schools and sell it. There would be no way to prove where it had come from.

“I wonder why you bothered burying it again, what with the talk going around,” the constable said. “They’re all going to be moved anyway, from the sounds of it.”

The Toronto Strangers’ Burying Ground was nearly full, its six acres crowded with those no church would bury. Strangers, as its name indicated — those who had no nearby family to see to a fitting burial: indigents, suicides, madmen, alcoholics, murderers. By 1826 there were enough of these in York County that their interment became a civic issue. It was the little rebel, William Lyon Mackenzie, who wrote fiery editorials in the Colonial Advocate, calling for a section of land to be set aside as a Potter’s Field. The corner of Yonge Street and the first concession line north of Lot Street was chosen as the site for this non-denominational graveyard, the land purchased with donations from the public. It was in “The Woods,” far from the city at the time. Over the years it became the final resting place not only of outcasts, but also of those unaffiliated with any of the established Toronto churches, which disdained the burial of anyone not their own.

But no one could have foreseen how fast the area would grow. Now, in 1851, the bustling village of Yorkville crowded in on the Burying Ground. It was swelling to envelop the cemetery, and its citizens were calling for the bodies to be moved to the newly established Necropolis, farther still from the growing city. There, the park-like setting along the bank of the Don River could easily accommodate the unmourned of Potter’s Field. If the colonial government could be persuaded to agree, this stumbling block to future growth would be conveniently removed. But no one seemed to know how long this might take.

Morgan’s midnight labour in reinterring the body was no wasted effort as far as he was concerned. He’d found it such a sad sight, the body ripped from the earth, the arm bone wrenched from the comforting folds of its shroud. He had wanted to restore it to what, after all, was supposed to be everlasting rest.

He thanked the constable for his time and left the man to fret over the wayward pigs and tavern licensing that comprised the normal concerns of a village policeman. And then, as he walked home, he realized that he would also have to make a written report to the Board of Trustees. This august body seldom met, consisting as it did of a number of prominent Toronto gentlemen who had far more important things to do with their time than to concern themselves with the day-to-day routine of the Strangers’ Burying Ground. Still, they would have to be informed.

Morgan wanted to put his sense of outrage into words, to make the board understand that he, too, felt violated by the desecration. That, as Keeper of the Burying Ground, the crime had been committed as much against his office as against the body. But words had never come easily to him, especially when they had to be written down. As he struggled to put the report to paper, scratching and crossing out, leaving blots of ink along the edges, he kept wishing that he could have simply escorted the gentlemen through the graveyard and shown them white bone against dark brown earth.